Many business and customer service organizations currently utilize automated call distribution systems which route incoming calls to operators or agents in one or more various appropriate departments or groups such as credit, repair or trouble departments. Such systems are efficient for their designated task. Moreover, companies presently utilizing such systems generally have substantial amounts of money and time invested in both system hardware and software as well as employee training to operate the system. Additionally, much of this hardware is proprietary and not designed to be used with the hardware of another manufacturer of telecommunication equipment.
Given current economic conditions, however, most businesses are now recognizing a need to also focus on customer credit and credit collection activities as well as customer service. Such activities require the use of an outbound calling telephone system. Providing an outbound calling system in a facility in which inbound calling capabilities already exist requires yet additional substantial investments in hardware, software and employee training. Most importantly, adding an outbound calling system alongside an existing inbound calling system results in tremendous waste and inefficiency including duplicative hardware and sometimes employees.
For example, providing such parallel inbound and outbound systems may require separate inbound and outbound call departments which requires additional employees and thus significantly increases a company's employee labor, benefits and training costs. Further, each group of agents, either inbound or outbound, is typically not kept busy at all times.
Alternatively, only one group of agents may be provided in which case two sets of equipment, one set for inbound call handling and one set for outbound call handling, must be provided. Such an implementation, however, requires the agents to have knowledge of the two systems. Most importantly, since both systems are operating independently, serious inefficiencies exist in coordinating an agent's activities. This may result in either an incoming caller or connected outbound called party remaining on hold for an extended period of time which is undesirable, or in the necessity to use a full time supervisor to manually assign each agent to one of an inbound or outbound call. The latter method, however, cannot take into account the telephone system's current statistical information such as the number of calls on hold, the length of time callers have been on hold, the number of outbound calls being placed and answered or the amount of time agents are spending on each call.
One prior art system for integrating outbound telephone dialing and overall system control to an existing inbound telephone system is shown in FIGS. 2 and 3. In this system, the integration is performed in the operator workstation and, upon request from the operator workstation, a server logs an available operator into the outbound telephone dialing system. The server then connects an operator to the inbound call distributor so that the intelligent operator workstation can query whether there are any inbound calls to be handled by the operator. If there are inbound calls to be handled, the operator is placed on inactive status in the outbound system and the inbound telephone system is directed to connect the inbound call to the available operator.
When an operator completes an inbound call, the intelligent workstation again interrogates the inbound telephone system through the server. If there are no inbound calls to be handled by this operator, the system makes the operator available for an outbound call. Through the server, the intelligent workstation signals the outbound calling device to place an outbound call or to transfer a previously dialed and answered outbound call to the available operator. Following "wrap-up" or completion of the outbound call, the system will again have the intelligent workstation query the inbound system to determine if the operator is needed to handle an inbound telephone call.
The problem with this system and method is that the intelligent operator workstation must constantly query the server and the inbound telephone system to perform the integration. There is no central information for the current status of each operator workstation, and there is no way of performing inquiries and automatically logging the operators onto the system based on the central statistical information.
Accordingly, what is required is a system which can be added to and transparently integrated with an existing inbound calling system without adding unnecessary or duplicative hardware to an agent's workstation, and which can automatically monitor both incoming and outbound calling activities to prioritize and maximize system performance according to various criteria established at each user site.